This week in RDT we have been learning all about Lunar New Year and the story of ‘The Great Race’, following last week’s celebrations. We began our learning by listening to the story of the ‘Great Race’ to help us learn why Lunar New Year is celebrated and about the 12 animals of the zodiac. We learnt that 2025 is a year of the snake and had a special parent/carer visitor who taught us all about how Lunar New Year is celebrated.

Our talk for writing learning this week involved sharing part of the story through our talking and writing skills. We recalled the different animals within the story and what happened. We then used colourful semantics to build our sentences when talking and writing.

When playing outside, we re-enacted the story by taking on the roles of the different animals and setting up our own races! We used stepping stones to build river banks for the race and ran as fast as we could through the water!

We really enjoyed making our own paper lanterns this week for Lunar New Year. We all concentrated carefully as we folded and cut lines in our paper to create the lantern. We then hung them around the classroom as decorations for our celebrations!

For our storytelling session this week, we created our own ‘Great Race’ story. We decided together to have six animals in our race, as we have been learning all about the number 6 in maths this week. We had lots of fantastic ideas, which we shared through speaking and listening as a group. We then created our own story maps to tell our ‘Great Race’ stories, using our mark-making and writing skills.

What a busy and exciting week of Lunar New Year celebrations in RDT!